We keep reading that if Donald Trump’s personal issues weren’t sucking up all the media oxygen, his campaign might get more traction against Hillary Clinton from the WikiLeaks disclosures, but is that really true?

Could a flailing Donald Trump campaign hurt down-ballot Republicans and cost the party majorities in the Senate and House? That seems possible, if he loses to Hillary Clinton by a margin similar to those in most current polls and if Americans keep on straight-ticket voting as they have increasingly in recent years.

LAS VEGAS — Standing in a garish hotel lobby, casino music pounding, a Republican who has worked hard to help Donald Trump couldn’t quite believe how the final presidential debate had ended just a couple of hours earlier.

America is often described as a society without the Old World’s aristocracy. Yet we still have people who feel entitled to boss the rest of us around. The “elite” media, the political class, Hollywood and university professors think their opinions are obviously correct, so they must educate us peasants.

Claiming the role of champions of the masses is something the political left has been doing ever since there has been a political left — which is to say, ever since the late 18th century, when people with such views sat on the left side of the French National Assembly.

It is never easy to tell what people’s motives are. But, when the political left proclaims their devotion to improving the lives of others in general, and of the poor in particular, we can at least get some clues from the way they go about it.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t know how reasonable people can fail to recognize the overt collusion of the Obama administration, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party and the liberal media to shield Hillary Clinton from accountability for her many misdeeds and abundant corruption.